Ship asks - 3 & 4!
Thank you so much for the questions and sorry in advance for probably answering about pairings you know close to nothing about. For funsies, I am doing this for Okichi (canon) and Okichisai (canon compliant as I picture it, cf. my fic The Second one).
3. How do you foresee their relationship evolving? Will they stay together long-term in some form, or eventually go their separate ways?
Okichi: Will they stay together long term? For Okichi? My favorite co-dependent couple? Yes yes, they will.
As much as Okita changed for the best at Chizuru's contact, by the end of the game he is still someone who lives uniquely for someone else (here Chizuru). Which is an issue, but it's okay because Chizuru is fully aware of it, knows it is an issue and is equipped and willing to deal with it, and she is also very much matching his freak. There is no Okita past 1868 without Chizuru canonically.
Respectively, Chizuru is not someone who ends up leaving the person she has come to care about the most, as we can see with her treatment of Kodo for whom she never completely lose affection nor hope (despite *the insert a very long list of shit he puts her through here* including lying, abandonment and in some routes more or less planning to use her for a breeding program!!!). She is not leaving Okita expect if he manages to convince her it the best for his own good... Which he won't.
Hey! Remember when he decided that it was okay to drag her, a civilian, through an active war zone because she said she wanted to stay by his side? I sure do. I also remember that many other ML in Hakuouki did not make this same choice at first. Okichi are a set, do not separate.
However, and it is because I like suffering, I don't think this long term is going to be very... long. By the end of the game Okita still has TB + he is a rasetsu. Being a rasetsu plus the water of the Yukimura village bought him some time sure (the epilogue is in 1869, in every other routes he dies in 1868), but he is not healthy and he is greatly diminished compared to the beginning of the story. I picture him surviving a decade or so more than in canon/real life but not much more. And his last years are clearly not great...
They do spend these years living together though. Reconnecting with the rest of the world slowly but living where the Yukimura village once stood. Maybe they will reconnect with Shinpachi and Saito at some points, maybe with Matsumoto-sensei too. Definitively with Sen. However, I think they keep a lot to themselves most of the time. They might have a kid. Not necessarily because they want one, but mainly because they are two people having sex in a pre-contraception world so this happen at some point. After Okita's death, I think Chizuru (and her child) would probably reach out to Sen and more or less integrate herself into the oni world because she doesn't really belong anywhere else anymore. I don't think she ever ends up in another romantic relationship because of... everything I mentioned about them being co-dependent above.
Okichisai: Saito is not the kind of guy who leaves either (except if he thinks it is better for the other party, and in this AU he doesn't). If Okita, Chizuru and Saito finds themselves romantically entangled, it's for life baby. Unfortunately, Okita still has the dreadfully poor health in this canon compliant AU, so their trio have the 10 years cap on it.
After Okita's death Chizuru and Saito stay together. There is an ugly Okita's shape hole in their life, but if there are two people who can pull through this kind of trauma it's them. They more or less live excatly like a monogamous couple would, but they never marry (people do assume that they are married). Mainly because they don't feel the need to, but also because no one originally married when they were three and they are not going to change that. In this AU, I personally picture the 3 of them as having 3 kids before Okita's death (Yuuzou, Okita's son, and a second daughter who is definitively Saito's because Okita was definitvely too sick by the time of her conception to have fathered a child). They don't want to change the way they interract with their kids, but I think the absence of Okita and the social pressure on the kids would eventually push the younger(s ?) toward calling Saito father. Saito has feelings (bad ones) about that, but doesn’t say anything about it because he can (or rather thinks he should) bear it, and he thinks that it is socially easier for the kids this way too.
4. Do they show affection through words or through action?
Okichi: through actions!
Like really they have a dedicated knightxknight dynamic that I adore. They are both so hellbent on dedicating their life to the other, it’s both hilarious and almost tragic. However, while Okita is hellbent on dedicating his life to the person je loves/cares the most about to the point of being okay with dying for them and is a professional clinger, I also think he is the most vocal about his feelings of the pair. It’s part of his development that he goes from guy always joking or threatening violence to not talk about how he feels, to being actually capable and willing to voice how he feels to Chizuru. He is definitely most often the first to say “I love you”, he expects Chizuru to answer him each time and she does.
Chizuru is also mostly showing her feelings by dedicating herself. However, part of this dedication goes through telling him explicitly that she cares about him (his health, his well-being, his stability, etc. like the very famous “I think you shouldn’t kill Hijikata. I think it would make you sad and I don’t want that”) and showing that she understand how he feels. So yeah a lot of her love does go through her words, they are just not “I love you” kind of words they are the “I get you want to avenge Kondo and this is important for you, but you are doing it wrong and probably making things worse. So let’s take two minutes to think about how we are going to deal with that.”
Okichisai: You want to know who is even more “I will show you my respect/feelings through actions rather than words” than Okita and Chizuru? Saito. I just think he believes him sharing his feelings with the people he cares about would be a failing on his part (surely they have better things to do than hear him talk about himself?). With Okita it is not an issue, because they understand each other with very few words to an insane degree.
With Chizuru it is more of an issue because she can be a bit insecure sometimes and she has a tendency to minimize herself so… That being said she knows he is trustworthy and she can rely on him very much, so it is rarely an issue. And when it is, Okita steps in by stating the obvious “of course he loves us. Look at him: his jaw is slightly tense because he is upset that you are feeling that way. ”
Saito probably said “I love you” to them like twice. One barely above a whisper in an intimate moment and probably as an answer to one of them saying it first (it did not felt like an obligation). The second time because he had a high fever and it shocked Chizuru so much that she had Okita fetch a ‘real’ doctor because really Saito must have been at death’s door. Sometimes Okita teases him about this.
